It’s part of a series of columns by Michael Enright covering his more than 50 years as a CBC journalist and television broadcaster covering Canadian and world news.
I grew up surrounded by guns, like many boys raised in the 50’s. Not in my Toronto apartment, but in the movies, on the radio and on television. I have no childhood memories that have not wrapped my arms around my life in some way. Weapons like toys. Pistols with caps, BB pistols, archers with rubber arrows, starter pistols, pistol models, Cooey .22 rifle or an ancient military relic of Lee-Anfield.
My favorite movies were westerns, where a cowboy hero or a cavalryman from the 7th Cavalry could cut off an enemy 40 yards away with his magic colt. Much later in my life, I would acquire a special police .38 Smith & Wesson.
At Christmas after Christmas, I begged my parents for a BB gun with a Red Ryder lever or maybe a pump. One Christmas, when I was about 10, Santa Claus (and my parents) came. Under the tree in all its glory as Red Ryder was my first BB pistol. (Apparently I was just like Ralphie in Christmas Story. Does anyone under the age of 30 know what BB is? Or caps?)
Ralph Parker in The Christmas Story holds a Red Ryder BB pistol. (Warner Bros.)
It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain the temptation of someone who has never owned or fired a gun. The heavy weight of the pistol or the dense smoothness of the butt of a rifle or rifle against the shoulder have an indisputable sensual quality.
Cops never showed their weapons when I was growing up. City cops and Mountis held their firearms tightly in their holsters, and Mountis’s weapons were strapped around his neck. Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet almost never pulled his .38, tightly hidden in a belt holster. Marshall Matt Dylan pulled and fired his Peacemaker at the opening of Gunsmoke and rarely after.
My mother’s brothers were enthusiastic duck hunters. My father never hunted and never owned a firearm. When I was about 12, I aimed my BB pistol at a robin, pulled the trigger, and hit him. I had killed a living thing. I couldn’t understand why it bothered me so much. As the movie says, it’s a sin to kill a mocker, and that’s how I felt when I killed a slave. I was wondering if I should include him in my confessional invitation to church on Saturday.
The idea of owning a shooting device and maybe killing people suddenly became unthinkable.
This week, a Toronto man carrying a pellet rifle locked four schools. He was shot by police.
My best memory is that there were no mass murders in my early youth. Or maybe there was and I just didn’t know about them.
In fact, my first shooting experience came in my early 20s, in 1966, when a former Marine named Charles Whitman shot at crowds of students from the University of Texas Tower in Austin. He killed 14 people over the next hour and a half. (Austin and Uwalde, Texas are about 250 miles apart.) But I loved Americans and America, and the massacre slipped from my mind.
One of the victims of Charles Joseph Whitman, the sniper who shot perch victims in the tower of the University of Texas on August 1, 1966, was transported across campus to an ambulance in Austin. (AP photo / file) (Associated Press)
As an adult, I didn’t pay much attention to guns until I moved to the United States in 1968 as a correspondent in Washington for a Canadian newspaper. I rented an apartment on Corcoran Street and 16th, about 10 blocks from the White House.
Late one night there was a knock on my door. My neighbor on the other side of the hall, a young teacher, was crying and trembling. Her apartment was broken into. I called the police and gave the woman a cup of coffee. Then she explained, “He came in through the window and I didn’t have a chance to get to my gun at the desk.”
At that moment, I decided to get rid of my gun. I haven’t owned a weapon since and I have no intention of doing so. sometime. The idea of owning a shooting device and maybe killing people suddenly became unthinkable. I was afraid that I might want to keep the gun as a kind of protection, a kind of protection that could kill me.
Living and working with the heavily armed is an enlightening but chilling experience. Americans value their rights under the Second Amendment almost to the point of fetishism. Weapon shows in small rural communities are hugely popular. The National Arms Association, once a leading proponent of gun control, is among the most powerful lobbies in Washington. (By the way, he meets at an annual convention this weekend in Texas.) Action movies and video games are marinated in pretentious gun violence. No wonder some young Americans are just as fascinated by the mysterious appeal of guns as I ever was.
A woman holds a Smith & Wesson pistol at the annual meeting of the National Arms Association in Indianapolis on April 28, 2019 (Bryan Woolston / Reuters)
When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, the nuns told us that we should practice safety measures in the event of a nuclear attack. We could defend ourselves by going down to the floor and putting our heads under the desk. American children in the 21st century are practicing blocking exercises.
The massacre of innocents continued in this country this week in a well-known, ritualized choreography. First the deaths, then the shock of parents and teachers, all the way to the president, followed by pro forma calls for thoughts and prayers.
The composite illustration shows 21 victims – including 19 children and two teachers – from a mass shooting at Rob Elementary School in Uwalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022 (Family Materials / Reuters).
In our games for cops and robbers, we shot at each other, reloaded our toy weapons, and continued the shootout, sometimes until dark. Then we went home for dinner and homework.
Unfortunately for today’s young people, weapons are real, bullets are real and deaths, dozens of deaths, are real.
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